The market for positive feedback

Even though it's been almost four years since John Morgan and Jennifer Brown published "Reputation in Online Auctions: The Market for Trust," it looks like things haven't changed much since then. This article describes how people use lots of small transactions at on-line auction sites to artificially inflate their reputation. In some cases they then use that positive reputation to give unlucky buyers unwarranted confidence in them that they then exploit.

This article has a story, for example, about a person who bought lots of items being sold on eBay for the very purpose of increasing a user's reputation. They apparently spent about $100 on this and then used the positive reputation from lots of successful $0.01 transactions to open the door to shady real estate deals in which they made several thousand dollars.

In any event, I was curious whether this was still the case. In Internet time, four years is quite a while, so I thought that things might have changed since then.

Apparently they haven't.

A quick search for "positive feedback" on eBay returns a list of lots of items that are still being sold just to increase a user's reputation. I didn't see what things were like back in 2005 to 2006 when Morgan and Brown were doing research for their paper, but I'd guess that they weren't much different.

Morgan and Brown talk about things being sold for $0.01 that were designed to just boost a user's reputation, and it looks like prices are a bit higher these days. I don't see any "Buy It Now" auctions for $0.01 for which you really don't get anything, and it looks like $1 is a more typical price now. This makes be think that scams that take advantage of the trust created by positive feedback are probably more prevalent now than they were four years ago.